"Very well, then, and how can the disproportion of what we have make your grandmamma uneasy?"
"Well, it's like this, you know--grandmamma is very fond of me, and she thinks that, as I am thirty-eight years younger than you, you might die before me, and that, after living for years in very great luxury, after letting myself get accustomed to every comfort, which, up to the present, I have not had, I might suddenly find myself very poor and very wretched at an age when it would be too late to begin life over again, and so I should suffer very much on account of the bad habits I had contracted, and which I should not be able to drop--"
"You know very well, my adored Bijou, that everything I possess is and will be yours. My will is already made, in which I leave everything to you, even if you do not become my wife."
"Yes, but she always says a will could be torn up."
"If your grandmamma would prefer it, I could make it over to you in a marriage settlement."
"Ah! she would imagine, then, that we might be divorced, and a divorce does away with all things--"
"But, supposing I make out in the marriage contract that the half of what I possess now is really yours, and supposing I made over the rest to you, only reserving to myself the interest?"
Bijou shook her head, and then, with a pretty movement of playful affection, she threw her soft arms round M. de Clagny's neck, and said:
"I don't want you to give me anything but happiness, and I am sure you will give me plenty of that. I hope you will live a very, very long time, and it would not matter to me, when I am old, if I were to find myself poor again, comparatively speaking."
"And I," he said, covering Denyse's face and hair with kisses, "I could not go on living with the thought that I might be taken away without your future being provided for in the way in which I should wish it to be."
"Don't talk about all those things," she murmured. "I want to think that I shall never be separated from you--never, never!"
Trying, in spite of the darkness, to look into Bijou's eyes, he asked anxiously:
"Will you be able to love me a little, as I love you?"
Without answering, she held her pretty lips up to him, but just at that moment the sound of voices made them move away from each other abruptly.